Implementing clinical pharmacogenomics in the classroom

Abstract

Pharmacogenomics provides a personalized approach to pharmacotherapy by using genetic information to guide drug dosing and selection. However, partly due to lack of education, pharmacogenomic testing has not been fully implemented in clinical practice. With pharmacotherapy training and patient accessibility, pharmacists are ideally suited to apply pharmacogenomics to patient care. Student pharmacists (n = 222) participated in an educational intervention that included voluntary personal genotyping using 23andMe. Of these, 31% of students completed both pre- and post-educational interventions to evaluate their attitudes and confidence towards the use of pharmacogenomics data in clinical decision making, and 55% of this paired subset obtained personal genotyping. McNemar's test and the Wilcoxon signed-rank test were used to analyze responses. Following the educational intervention, students regardless of genotyping were more likely to recommend personal genotyping (36% post-educational intervention versus 19% pre-educational intervention, p = 0.0032), more confident in using pharmacogenomics in the management of drug therapy (51% post-educational intervention versus 29% pre-educational intervention, p = 0.0045), and more likely to believe that personalized genomics would have an important role in their future pharmacy career (90% post-educational intervention versus 51% pre-educational intervention, p = 0.0072) compared to before receiving the educational intervention. This educational intervention positively influenced students' attitudes and confidence regarding pharmacogenomics in the clinical setting. Future studies will examine the use of next-generation sequencing assays that selectively examine pharmacogenes in the education of student pharmacists.